What is Coming? eBook

each one of you, make no concessions and no sacrifices,
obstruct, waste, squabble, and presently I will come
back again and take all that fresh harvest of life
I have spared, all those millions that are now sweet
children and dear little boys and youths, and I will
squeeze it into red pulp between my hands, I will mix
it with the mud of trenches and feast on it before
your eyes, even more damnably than I have done with
your grown-up sons and young men. And I have taken
most of your superfluities already; next time I will
take your barest necessities.”

So the red god, Mars; and in these days of universal
education the great mass of people will understand
plainly now that that is his message and intention.
Men who cannot be swayed by the love of order and creation
may be swayed by the thought of death and destruction....
There, I think, is the overriding argument that will
burst the proprietorships and divisions and boundaries,
the web of ineffectiveness that has held the world
so long. Labour returning from the trenches to
its country and demanding promptness, planning, generous
and devoted leaderships and organisation, demanding
that the usurer and financier, the landlord and lawyer
shall, if need be, get themselves altogether out of
the way, will have behind its arguments the thought
of the enemy still unsubdued, still formidable, recovering.
Both sides will feel that. This world is a more
illuminated world than 1816; a thousand questions between
law and duty have been discussed since then; beyond
all comparison we know better what we are doing.
I think the broad side of John Smith (and Sir John
Smith and John Smith, K.C.) will get the better of
his narrow ends—­and that so it will be
with Jean Dupont and Hans Meyer and the rest of them.
There may be riots here and there; there may be some
pretty considerable rows; but I do not think there
is going to be a chaotic and merely destructive phase
in Great Britain or any Western European country.
I cast my guess for reconstruction and not for revolt.

V. HOW FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD SOCIALISM?

A number of people are saying that this war is to
be the end of Individualism. “Go as you
please” has had its death-blow. Out of this
war, whatever else emerges, there will emerge a more
highly organised State than existed before—­that
is to say, a less individualistic and more socialistic
State. And there seems a heavy weight of probability
on the side of this view. But there are also
a number of less obvious countervailing considerations
that may quite possibly modify or reverse this tendency.

In this chapter an attempt is to be made to strike
a balance between the two systems of forces, and guess
how much will be private and how much public in Europe
in 1930, or thereabouts.